The South Korean military coup of May 16, 1961, held promise for the installation of an effective authoritarian regime. No military coup is free from some violence, arrests, and other means of conflict and repression. By
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these standards, this coup entailed rather low levels of violence or other forms of resistance. The new government repressed the organized labor movement and provided few inducements for organized labor support for the regime but, at its birth, it also faced relatively little resistance from organized labor. Moreover, the rebellious officers had a legitimating claim: to overcome a recent past of corrupt practices in government, to accelerate the prospects for economic growth, and thus to build a stronger South Korea to face its communist enemy to the north. There was also little difficulty in establishing who was in charge. General Park Chung Hee was the coup’s principal leader and the head of the military junta.8
Park’s political role from the start was so great that he reduced the likelihood of collegial rule. He soon marginalized his most important comrade in coup plotting, Kim Chong-p’il. He ordered the court martial of General Yun P’il-yong in 1973 on the basis of slender information that General Yun had begun to think about Park’s succession.9 Park took no credible steps to provide for his own succession, never transferred power peacefully, and was assassinated while still serving as president.
The Park regime’s political installation record looks somewhat worse than Argentina’s, roughly comparable to Brazil’s. At first, the June 1966
coup in Argentina held even more promise of installing an effective authoritarian regime. “There was almost no opposition to the coup within the armed forces, and there was practically no civilian attempt to prevent it,” writes Guillermo O’Donnell. He adds that “the coup had the approval of most of the population and of nearly all social organizations . . . [including] a considerable part of the popular sector, and was endorsed by a majority of political and union leaders.”10 The claim to legitimacy was the search for Argentina’s modernization and faster economic growth as well as the eradication of corruption, for all of which “order” was the key.
South Korea and Argentina in 1966 were similar on two other dimensions. There was also no doubt in Argentina in 1966 about who was in charge: the army’s commander in chief Lt. General Juan Carlos Onganía, whose ascendancy had been undisputed since armed clashes in 1962–
1963. Onganía’s towering role made it difficult to create institutionalized procedures within the dictatorship to respond to crises with flexibility. In South Korea, Park’s comparable dominance during the 1960s gradually reduced his regime’s capacity for flexible response as well.
The Argentine authoritarian regime unraveled more quickly than South Korea’s, however. In April and May 1969, there were massive uprisings in Argentina’s major urban centers, particularly among blue-collar workers, events known as the “Cordobazo.” The government had suppressed channels of popular representation so well that it lacked information about dis-
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content. On June 8, 1970, the commanders of the army, navy, and air force deposed Onganía. His successor, Roberto Levingston, a junior general, was overthrown in 1971 by General Alejandro Lanusse, who ended the military regime in 1973.
At its installation moment, the subsequent Argentine dictatorship, which began with a coup on March 24, 1976, improved somewhat on the 1966 pattern and, hence, also on what had taken place in South Korea. Between 1973 and 1976, Argentina was governed by three Peronista presidents: provisionally by Héctor Cámpora, and then by Juan Domingo Pe-rón (who died in office) and was succeeded by the vice president, his wife, María Estela Martínez (Isabel) de Perón. By the time of her overthrow, Argentina had sunk into chaos. In the first quarter of 1976, the annualized inflation rate was 3,000 percent; labor unions were vigorously militant.
Extensive civil violence broke out, including terrorist and paramilitary assassinations and kidnappings. “To no one’s great surprise, and to the un-disguised relief of many ordinary Argentines (including Peronists), the armed forces . . . deposed the now thoroughly discredited Peronist regime.
There was no resistance.”11 The legitimating claim was similar, only more urgent. Argentina had to stabilize its economy and end civil violence. The armed forces chose to employ very high levels of repression, however, even though there had been little resistance to the coup.12
The Argentine military had also learned from its previous dictatorship and, as we shall see, from the Brazilian experience. Upon taking power in 1976, the military issued a “Statute of the Revolution” that stipulated a single, five-year mandate for any presidential incumbent. In 1976, General Jorge Videla, chief of the army, became president while agreeing on the termination date for his time in office. From the start, a presidential succession was scheduled for, and took place in, March 1981. At that moment, however, Argentina was in the midst of a financial crisis. The new president, General Roberto Viola, was overthrown in December 1981; his successor, General Leopoldo Galtieri, ousted in July 1982, was held responsible for Argentina’s defeat at war with the United Kingdom over islands in the South Atlantic Ocean.
Thus Argentina’s starting circumstances were slightly more auspicious for the installation of dictatorship at both times (but especially in 1976) than in South Korea, because in Argentina there was little opposition and extensive support for both coups. Onganía’s and Videla’s predominance was comparable to Park’s, and neither had a good strategy for institutionalized succession. But the Argentine military in 1976 had a better plan to institutionalize authoritarian rule than Park or Onganía did.
The Brazilian armed forces overthrew President João Goulart in a revolt
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between March 30 and April 2, 1964. The general confederation of workers called for a general strike, but the workers did not respond. Loyalist troops failed to fight the military rebellion. Calls for a popular uprising went unheeded. Brazil, too, had suffered from intense and widespread social conflict and from high inflation in the months preceding the coup (though at rates much lower than in Argentina and Chile at the time of the 1976 and 1973 coups, respectively). The Goulart government had been politically weak and presided over economic stagnation. Goulart had been elected vice president in October 1960 and acceded to the presidency in August 1961 only because President Jânio Quadros resigned. In circumstances similar to South Korea’s at the time of the 1961 coup, the Brazilian armed forces claimed legitimacy to overcome these ills.
Initial conditions were less favorable in Brazil than in South Korea, however, because the organization of power in the new regime took some time to construct. The war minister, General Dantas Ribeiro, was immobi-lized in the hospital. The chief of the Army General Staff, General Hum-berto Castello Branco, took the lead in the military conspiracy but political complexity deferred his becoming president until April 11. Castello Branco was elected to the remainder of the presidential term—that is, the Brazilian constitution was not set aside but would be amended tortuously and painfully in subsequent years. The Congress was purged; political parties were dissolved, and presidential elections and gubernatorial elections were made indirect. But the notion that no single person had seized power remained entrenched.
The military reached consensus on General Arthur Costa e Silva, chosen as president in October 1966. The Brazilian authoritarian regime thus completed its installation featuring institutionalized succession within the authoritarian regime. There would be a total of four peaceful transitions of presidential power during the authoritarian regime (and thus five military presidents) before its end in 1985. The difficulty in making the coup and consolidating the regime at the start led the Brazilian military to install more collegial and eventually more effective procedures of rule than in South Korea, Argentina of 1966, or Chile, and more successful than in Argentina of 1976–1983.13
In short, at the start
the installation of dictatorship in Brazil was less propitious than in South Korea in terms of leadership unity and about the same in terms of resistance to the installation. But the Brazilian dictatorship was more effective at establishing workable succession rules.
The Park regime’s installation looks better than the opening moments of General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. There was more resistance to the overthrow of constitutionally elected president Salvador
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Allende in Chile in 1973 than in South Korea’s comparable moment in 1961. The brutality of immediate military repression of that resistance in Chile in 1973 exceeded repression levels in South Korea in 1961. During the last twelve months of Allende’s presidency, the annualized inflation rate was 286 percent; social conflict was widespread and intense. Chileans were more divided than South Koreans and Argentines at the moment of the founding coup, but many Chileans welcomed the dictatorship and most acquiesced to it in order to “rescue” Chile from chaos and confrontation—the new military regime’s claim to legitimacy.
In contrast to Argentina, Brazil, and South Korea, military authority in Chile at the time of the coup was in flux. Before the coup, the Chilean military’s chain of command snapped several times and a military mutiny occurred in June 1973. Pinochet was sworn in as commander in chief of the army only nineteen days before the coup that overthrew Allende. In the air force, General Gustavo Leigh was appointed commander in chief only twenty-nine days before the coup. In the navy, Vice Admiral José Toribio Merino was appointed chief only four days before the coup. All three had conspired not just against Allende but also against the officers whom they replaced. These three coup plotters were joined by the chief of police to create a four-man ruling junta. Moreover, Generals Sergio Arellano and Oscar Bonilla, “both more dashing and respected than Pinochet, emerged as heroes of the coup with new sources of power.” Bonilla became interior minister; Arellano, commander of the garrison for the capital city. Within six months, both generals met mysterious deaths. Pinochet’s predecessor as army commander in chief, General Carlos Prats, remained popular in the army and in Chile; he was assassinated in September 1974. The military junta made Pinochet the chief executive only in June 1974. In July 1978, Pinochet ousted General Leigh from the junta (not unlike the case of General Yun in South Korea in 1973) for deigning to discuss transition scenarios. In part because Pinochet had such difficulty in establishing his primacy, he took no steps to organize his succession within the authoritarian regime. Until the day of his defeat in a plebiscite in 1988, he never believed that he would stop serving as Chile’s president until his death.14 The Chilean installation was thus more troubled at the outset than South Korea’s—
greater initial resistance, lower leadership unity—and equally poor in the shared failure to institutionalize succession within the regime.
The Mexican authoritarian installation was initially the most troubled.
Resistance to new rulers was high and leadership unity was low. The Mexican revolution began in October 1910, swiftly overthrew President General Porfirio Díaz, but continued for much of that decade as various factions fought each other. In 1920, the most powerful revolutionary com-
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mander, General Venustiano Carranza, who had become president of Mexico, attempted to impose his chosen successor for the presidency.
Carranza’s gambit failed. He was killed in May 1920. The second great survivor of the revolution, General Francisco (Pancho) Villa, signed a peace agreement in July 1920. There was, however, no one winner but a trium-virate. General Adolfo de la Huerta became provisional president until General Alvaro Obregón was elected president later that year. General Plutarco Elías Calles followed, being elected in 1924 after the government beat back General de la Huerta’s rebellion. Obregón was reelected in 1928
but was assassinated by a religious fanatic before his presidential inauguration. Religious civil war flared in various regions of Mexico between 1926 and 1929. The elections of the 1920s were uncompetitive and fraudulent.
Faced with civil war, the assassination of Mexico’s president-elect, and prospects for further instability, in 1929 President Calles acted as if he had read Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Because men live in a perpetual state of war without a leviathan, “the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brut-ish, and short.” Therefore, men agree on a covenant: “I authorize and give up my right of governing myself, to this [single party], on this condition, that thou give up thy right to [it], and authorize all [its] actions in like manner.”15 On the occasion of his last message to Congress, Calles called for the formation of a single party. The National Revolutionary Party, founded in March 1929, included all the powerful military leaders and civilian bosses. Until 1934, Calles ruled indirectly through puppet presidents: Emilio Portes Gil, Pascual Ortiz Rubio, and Abelardo Rodríguez.
Calles also tried to control Lázaro Cárdenas, elected in 1934, but Cárdenas broke Calles’s power and, in April 1936, exiled him.16
Anchored in a single party, eventually known as the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the Mexican authoritarian regime lasted until the 1990s. The first president of Mexico ever elected from the opposition, Vicente Fox, took office only in December 2000. A key to the regime’s success was its no-reelection rule, which applied to presidents, governors, mayors, members of Congress, and subnational legislators. You obey me today, the regime’s key rule implied, in the certainty that I will step down on schedule and you will then have your chance to rule. Starting at the end of Cárdenas’s six-year term in 1940, there were ten peaceful presidential successions within the same single-party regime. In addition to its hold on the presidency until 2000, the ruling party controlled every governorship until 1989 and both chambers of Congress until 1997; it typically claimed three-quarters to nine-tenths of the valid votes cast in every presidential election until 1988.
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In Mexico, more than in Brazil in 1964 but unlike in South Korea, Argentina, and Chile, the contestation at the start of the authoritarian regime forced a collegial outcome. This contributed to a longer-lasting and more stable authoritarian regime. The early emergence and consolidation of rule by Park, Pinochet, and Onganía worked to the detriment of the installation of a long-term institutionalized authoritarian regime.
The Choice of Institutional Means
Every authoritarian regime studied here chose the same institutional means for executive decision making. The new ruler delegated significant powers to civilians in specialized areas of the regime. These regimes differed, however, in their choice of institutional means for rule making and information gathering. The Chilean and Argentine militaries abolished parliament, while the Brazilian and Mexican militaries retained parliaments. South Korea retained a parliament during 1961–1972 but gutted it during the so-called yushin period, 1972–1979. The “parliamentary dictatorships” employed consultative procedures, legislative assemblies, and party organizations to shape the new rules for governing; in general, the greater the resort to these procedures, the lower was its resort to police or military repression.
President Park relied on highly talented and admirably trained civilian economic policy officials, privileging the role of the Economic Planning Bureau.17 South Korea’s economic growth during the Park era was stunning. President Onganía chose a comparably talented civilian minister of the economy and labor (who also controlled the finance ministry), Adalberto Krieger Vasena, who served from 1967 through 1969. Inflation fell, average annual industrial wages in real terms did not decline, and the growth rate of per capita gross domestic product reached 7 percent in 1969, Krieger’s last year.18 President Videla’s economic policies were less successful, though he also relied on a bright civilian minster of the economy, José Martínez de Hoz. Unable to cut the budget deficit because of military and other pressures, Martínez de Hoz manipulated the exchang
e rate to bring down inflation but ultimately failed.19
The Brazilian military likewise hired talented and hardheaded civilian finance ministers. Key reforms were enacted under Roberto Campos and Octávio Gouvéia de Bulhões, with Campos in the lead as planning minister. The military government’s economic growth policy, however, can be traced to the appointment of Antonio Delfim Neto in March 1967. The rate of economic growth doubled from 4.8 percent in 1967 to 9.3 percent
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in 1968; it stayed above that rate for four consecutive years, with growth rates in the 1970s averaging 8 percent through 1976. This period was known as the Brazilian economic “miracle.” The military government’s economic policies were less successful thereafter, but civilian officials continued to design and implement economic policy.20
President Pinochet made famous his “Chicago Boys”—civilian economic policy officials trained at the University of Chicago. However, Chilean economic policy in the 1970s and early 1980s was unevenly successful at best, plunging Chile into a financial panic in 1983.21 A different set of civilian ministers engineered Chile’s economic recovery for the balance of the 1980s.
The last general to serve as president of Mexico, Manuel Ávila Ca-macho, stepped down in 1946. Civilian economic policy officials prevailed throughout Mexican twentieth-century history, and certainly during the years of the Mexican “miracle,” 1940–1960, when the average annual growth rate exceeded 6 percent. Mexican economic malperformance occurred only later.22
The South Korean and Brazilian regimes, Mexico’s from the 1940s through the 1960s, Argentina’s in 1966–1973, and again in 1981–1982
also worked closely with industrialists. They all privileged the development of manufacturing, including heavy industry, concentrated in large business conglomerates, creating oligopolies in the hopes that the firms would become “national champions.” Mexico remained strongly supportive of manufacturing even through the 1970s and early 1980s, but political disputes arose frequently between entrepreneurs and leading government officials during those years over issues other than the shared support for the growth of manufacturing. The Chilean regime and the Argentine dictatorship in 1976–1981, on the contrary, followed policies that weakened manufacturing capacities and industrial interests.23
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